It's election time again in Canada, what with BC's municipal elections in two weeks, and the campaigns for the US primaries for President, Congress, state officers down to local sheriffs are underway. In Mississippi all candidates for every office assert they are pro-life but in favour of prohibition. Irony and contradiction abound.

It takes guts and courage for anyone in the cannabis culture to get out and vote. You risk breaking your heart and having your faith in democracy (or what passes for it today) repudiated time and time again. And mostly the choices are sordid, like here in Mississippi where the intolerant, backward and failed try to outdo the other intolerant wretch offering the same poison to the same weary yet still gullible rubes.

In my hometown Vancouver you get a Mayor seeking re-election who was, as far as I understand, an active member of our culture in the north Gulf Islands once upon a time, but you never hear him stand up for us as a culture. He never criticizes the prohibition that fuels gang violence in our city. Having run for Mayor myself in 1996, 2002 and 2008, I have seen first-hand that you get no respect accurately assessing the problems of your hometown and providing real-world solutions. My campaigns from those years all accurately surmised the problems awaiting the city; I gave scientifically validated solutions, and was roundly rejected by voters choosing soothsayers that buried the city further in the mire, in all possible ways. I suppose the voters got what they deserved, good and hard, alas. Or did they?

I've seen in my lifetime Canadian Prime Ministers who smoked marijuana (Campbell, Trudeau) or ate cannabis brownies (Martin, Premiers who smoked it (Charest, Klein), smuggled it (Glen Clark), US Presidents who smoked it (G.W. Bush, Barack Obama), US governors who did the same (Jerry Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura), Senators, Congressmen, even Princes (Harry) – and in office or positions of power they never even try to reform the brutal prohibition that causes such senseless misery for an entire planet.

We have the sight of former Presidents of Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia advocating legalization and an end to prohibition, though while in office they did the exact opposite as the commanders in chief in their nations during the world's longest war. We see the same from former US secretaries of State (Schultz), Attorney Generals (Ramsay Clark), ex-cops, ex-judges, and ex-mayors – but when in their positions of power and authority, they towed the prohibitionist line as faithfully as any drug warrior.

The obvious conclusion is that we're only voting in figureheads. The bureaucracy and the institution control the agenda and the figurehead is who we elect to sell us the propaganda of the institutions and agencies: the DEA, FBI, ATF, NSA, CIA, RCMP, CSIS, Homeland Security, Border patrol, SWAT.

You'll notice that these institutions are never held accountable for the terrible damage they do to our communities, our democracy, and our quality of life. It always gets worse, doesn't it? Deficits: worse. Drug arrests: worse. Jails: worse. Surveillance state: worse. By every measure, the modern state is more corrupt, cynical, self-serving than ever before.

One hundred SWAT raids on homes in America every day? Check. The Justice Department delivering thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels in Operation Fast & Furious, and no one is accountable? Check. Budgets for the drug war up? Check. Budgets for militarism up? Check. Budgets for prisons up? Check. Increased deficits, cuts to schools, hospitals, pensions, health care? Check. Where are the results?! I mean, where are the positive results that justify this colossal waste and failure? No explanations are offered and none, seemingly, are required.

Occasionally they arrest a rogue cop or two planting drugs or smuggling guns, but this is done only to preserve the public credibility of the institution that, at its heart, is anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-human. No politician does anything substantive in any way to end prohibition, militarism, deficit financing, or any other freedom-withering disease affecting us all that comes from corrupted governments and their institutions and agencies.

Some politicians speak out before an election as to these ills, and some speak out after they are out of office, but while actually in office (I hesitate to say, in power, because if they don't use it, do they really have it?), they rubber stamp and shill for every excess of the modern police state.

Why is that?

In Canada, The Conservative Government under the banal and smug Justice Minister Rob Nicholson have introduced Bill C-10, making jail sentences of at least six months (and in numerous circumstance, far greater jail time) for a person growing as few as six marijuana plants – and many worse mandatory minimum prison sentences for cannabis related offenses. Rob Nicholson says six months for six plants is "just the beginning". Two questions come immediately to mind. What exactly is "just the beginning"? And what exactly will be the end?

The answer to both is gangster government, specifically "legislated death" and the "intellectual authorship of perpetual mass murder." That's what any politician in Canada, the USA or Mexico, or anywhere in the world is endorsing and shilling for when they prop up any aspect of prohibition. Such is the art of politics these days.

The proof comes from a very special, very undeniable book that is now available. You think you've read it all, think again.

To Die In Mexico… The United States… Canada… Anywhere

In the past two decades we've all read a lot of stuff about the "drug war", but you've never read anything quite like "To Die In Mexico: Dispatches from Inside The Drug War" by John Gibler.

This book Jodie sent me gives a revealing look into the type of mentality that would put someone – like me, for example – in prison for offenses involving legalization and seeds. To understand the type of inhuman actions catalogued in this book is to understand the mentality of the prohibitionists/gangsters and the governments they now totally control (and, conversely, that control them). As you read about the butchery and savagery, remember that all this is facilitated and promoted by governments and their agencies in the new World of Prohibition. In this book the full scope of this fatal disease finally comes in to view. (As an aside, still the greatest book every written on the depraved evil nature of our enemies, the prohibitionists, is found in a book called "Drug Warriors & Their Prey" by Richard Miller Lawrence.)

While other countries are in different stages of prohibition self-destruction (Canada is "just beginning"), Mexico has arrived at the end. After reading this book it becomes a documented fact that wherever you have prohibition you have gangster government. One cannot exist without the other. Thugs need prohibition laws, and prohibition laws need thugs. They are as the sun is to the moon, the desert to sand – they cannot exist without each other; that is their nature.

To see Mexico is to see the final future of prohibition everywhere. Mexico just got there first. If there is still any doubt that prohibition has given total power to the absolute worst that humanity has to offer, both inside and outside governments around the world, then this book decimates that doubt.

The corrupting power of the unimaginable profits from prohibition have simply taken over society's institutions. After all, we're dealing with political authority, whether it is in Mexico, Canada, the USA or anywhere else. And since history shows us that political authority is inherently corrupt (and I would add, inherently immoral), it just can't resist this unprecedented level of corrupt money, corrupt power, and corrupt social control that prohibition offers.

From the book:

"In 2009, the United Nations reported that some $350 billion in drug money had been successfully laundered into the global banking system in the prior year [2008], saving it from collapse."

Translation: Global economic stability (such as it is) and government now depend on the type of people who, according to this book, murder and stitch the faces of their victims to soccer balls in Mexico. These are the same people the Justice Department themselves delivered thousands of weapons to in Operation Fast & Furious and numerous other drug war charades.

If you want to understand the type of demented mentality that has put me and hundreds of thousands of others in the cruel conditions we are in, if you want to understand the warped minds that dream up "six months for six plants" or five years for seeds (or legalization advocacy) or 10 to 20 years for running a California dispensary, if you want to understand the sick personality behind what’s described in "To Die in Mexico" as so horrific that "the bare facts are so terrifying they pass beyond the edge of anything credible" – it’s all in this book.

There has never been such a powerful, damning and frightening work on prohibition. That's because the other journalists who tried to write this specific story have been murdered. According to author Gibler, 68 reporters have been killed in Mexico's all-out "war on drugs" that the Harper government now wants to emulate, and that the US Justice Department has been orchestrating from Washington, DC for decades. Forty-seven of those were murdered between 2008 and 2010, and an additional 15 have "disappeared".

The aim of this book, says the author, is to tell the story other journalists died trying to tell.

*****

Governments have simply become another organized crime group fighting to control the prohibition trade. Police are used by a coalition of government and gangsters to remove the threats from competing gangster groups. Essentially, governments have become the enforcement arm of the gangster cartels as they battle for control of an evil that now holds the financial fate of the globe in its bloodied hands.

I can't do justice to the book with a brief summary. The facts are unrelentingly damning; it must be read, but here are a few excerpts. These are the universal tactics and results of prohibition. Today it’s Mexico; tomorrow it’s Canada. (See if point #8 from the book rings a bell.)

1) According to the Mexican government's own estimate, people working for the various illegal narcotics businesses have directly infiltrated more than half of the municipal police forces.

2) The federal police forces are the main recruiting centers for mid-level drug trafficking operators.

3) The army and the state police are the main recruitment centers for the enforcers, the paramilitary units in charge of assassinations.

4) In the United States, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have sent billions in money, arms, and military aid to Mexico's army and state police to 'help them' 'combat drug trafficking' (see points #1 – #3). US media is cowed and docile; they rarely report the Mexican army and federal and state police are very often the actual drug traffickers. Thus, US citizens finance the murder and corruption pervasive in Mexico.

5) Death is good business. The Brookings Institution estimates that on average two thousand guns (ranging from cop-killer pistols to AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles) are legally purchased in the United States and then smuggled across the border into Mexico every day!

6) "PROHIBITED: LITTERING AND DUMPING CORPSES": This was a sign a Mexican citizen put outside his house after repeated incidences of dead bodies being dumped in front of his suburban home. Thugs then shot him and his daughter and dumped them under the sign.

7) The use of prohibition for racial social control is the genesis of the modern drug prohibition era. This we are all very familiar with, but never as well explained and proven as it is in "To Die in Mexico".

8) With full support from the US Congress, successive presidential administrations have used drug war tactics such as extradition as tools to bend less powerful nations into compliance with prohibition and US intervention into their affairs.

*****

When we petition the politicians on the prohibition issue we should try to remember we are petitioning members of a global criminal enterprise. To overlook or ignore this would be akin to petitioning the Boston Strangler for better treatment for women and pretending he's not the Boston Strangler.

This book comes out at an interesting time for Canada. A few days ago two members of the "drug trade" were shot dead in an execution hit at a tanning salon in a cozy Ottawa, Canada shopping center, just a few miles from Parliament Hill where the federal Omnibus Crime Bill C-10 (aka "The Organized Crime Employment Act") will be passed shortly.

Of course, this is "just the beginning" as Rob Nicholson has promised us. By the end, we'll have blood and terror on a regular basis, just like Mexico. So far, says author Gibler, in five years – from 2006 to May 2011 – 38,000 people have died from Mexico's prohibition war.

Here’s how he describes the policy:

"All discourse about prohibition as a public safety policy is self-serving, fundamentalist lies tantamount to complicity in the intellectual authorship of perpetual mass murder… Let us be clear, prohibition is legislated death."

"The drug war is a horrid success of state violence and capitalist accumulation, a cash-intoxicated marketplace that simply budgets for murder and political graft to keep things running smoothly."

Therefore, as long as we continue to have comments by advocates of legalization describing prohibitionists as "well-intentioned", even while saying prohibition creates organized crime, these political gangsters will thrive. As long as opposition politicians and mainstream media continue to treat prohibitionists as civilized people who are simply misguided in their altruistic efforts to save us from ourselves, things will only get worse.

Gangsters, perpetual mass murder, legislated death, packed and cruel prisons, bankrupted treasuries, abolished civil liberties, preening politicians celebrating the glory of this gruesome situation with calls for yet more of the prohibition poison that created this ceaseless cycle of violence and despair – this is how opponents of prohibition must present their case. It’s certainly why I am in jail; no one yelled louder and longer that this was all coming to pass than I. The truth does get out. It's why my wife Jodie is the most frequently quoted Canadian activist, and Cannabis Culture is still the #1 website for the truth about prohibition.

But when Members of the Canadian Parliament like Libby Davies say the Conservative government is "blind" to the evils of prohibition, it's like her saying Charles Manson was blind to what the family was doing with those knives. I mention Libby because she is a good person who works hard against prohibition. She's sincere. She's the best of the lot. And that's my point. Even she can't speak the truth of the political organized crime that is prohibition.

The media never, ever says this, even the best of them, like Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen and cross-Canada newspapers. As a result the public is always left with this profound mystery of why these pristine politicians who get streets named after them would be so blind and misled as to support something so evil as prohibition. Surely all we have to do is put the facts in front of them and they will see the light, right?

Wrong.

So in light of all this 'inevitability' of the scourges of prohibition, can anything be done? What needs to be done is what we've been doing, just more of it.

We need to get referendums and ballot initiatives before the voters, we need to give campaign contributions to those few candidates (like Ron Paul, Gary Johnson) explicit about ending prohibition, we need to label the prohibitionists and their acolytes for the murderous sympathizers that they are. After all, if all drugs were legal in Mexico, Canada, and the United States, would 38,000 dead victims of prohibition be alive today? Yes, they would.

The cannabis culture has been at this for a while, at least 16 years. And we've nailed the truth of it. So what does the truth tell us? If we stick at it, facts do win over the people. Those public opinion legalization majorities in Canada and the US were 40 years in the making, starting out at 12% support in 1970. So what has happened? We might just be witnessing the tipping point of the collapse of the greatest and most evil propaganda power in history. Prohibition is having its biggest test, and the downfall of prohibition will break the back of the propaganda system that has ruled our modern age.

Bear in mind we are living in the world's most technologically advanced civilization. Push a computer button and you can eventually find the truth about anything. Finding the truth is not the problem. The problem is accepting it. For even with the truth staring the public in the face, we still have society's movers and shakers lying and saying that prohibitionists are "well intentioned" and believe they are working for the public good.

Even alcohol prohibition, when it was finally abolished, was still sold as a "noble experiment."

In the past 40 years of modern marijuana prohibition, the dupes among the people were willing to believe people should die of cancer, AIDS, and suffer through Multiple Sclerosis, crippling spasticity diseases, epilepsy, pain, and other ailments simply to preserve the barbarous prohibitionist status quo. Many of the people among us chose these torturous political policies over the medical and scientific truth that is now everywhere to be found. These "well-meaning" citizens would see your children (or parents) thrown in jail and threatened with rape, allow police to smash into the homes of citizens and terrorize them, have that property seized, the family dispossessed, lose their jobs, and be shot as collateral damage in the gangster wars. These "good (prohibitionist) neighbors" believed in a nation of rats squealing on their neighbors, a violent narco-economy replacing the traditional but now bankrupted economy, a global gangster government that now holds the world's finances in its bloody jaws.

They would faithfully believe all this is being done with "good intentions" because anything is better than facing the truth that they are ruled by thugs.

However, the hold that propaganda has given these evil prohibitionists over the public has crumbled. Once again, we give thinks to Mr. Wozniak for inventing the personal computer. It is this technology that has given us the power to defeat this propaganda system. The recent NY Times poll showed 90% of Americans don't trust politicians or government. The public doesn't believe most or all of what comes out of politicians' mouths, especially about prohibition. In British Columbia, 66% want to legalize marijuana and only 12% support jailing cannabis offenders, yet our Premier, Christy Clark, can't sell out to the police fast enough in their request for more prohibition, more jails, more punishments. In opposition provincially, Adrian Dix of the BC NDP stays mute, as the provincial NDP always has, and condones the thuggeries of prohibition. Sad times indeed, in my home province. Medical dispensaries are being raided frequently and operators charged. The prohibition seems to be being ramped up all over Canada.

Yet hope comes from strange, unexpected places. The provincial governments of Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland said they won't pay for the new Conservative massive increase in prison costs and consequences. Quebec has even said the politically unthinkable: not only do they reject the financial costs, they also reject the human costs of ratcheting up the prohibition!

I have to believe this is the home stretch of our fight. We must make it so the evil acts of these prohibitionists nauseate any civilized person. We are at the tipping point. Yes, it has taken an awfully long time.

With their propaganda dominance now corroding, all the prohibitionists have left is the same thing the Nazis had left at the end, and that is Gestapo terror. Desperate prohibition police forces in both Canada and the United States ignore the democratic will, and raid, threaten, rob, jail and physically brutalize taxpaying citizens. The Nazis obsessed in their final days with the executing and murdering as many of their enemies until the moment the allies arrived to liberate that soil. That was their only imperative. The war was lost, so instead of facing the truth, they would destroy those who had always spoken the truth and represented it.